Abstract
High-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, which are designed so as to encourage more people to use high-capacity travel modes and thus move more people in a single roadway lane, have been implemented as a lane management measure to deal with the growing traffic congestion in practice. However, the implementation has shown that some HOV lanes are not able to achieve the expected effects without proper HOV lane settings. In this study, the tradable credits scheme (TCS) is introduced to improve the HOV lane management and an optimal capacity of HOV lanes in a multilane highway is investigated to match TCSs. To approach the investigation, a bilevel programming model is proposed. The upper-level represents the decision of the highway authority and the lower-level follows the commuters’ user equilibrium with deterministic demand. The potential influence of TCSs is further investigated within the proposed framework. A modified genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the bilevel programming model. Numerical examples demonstrate that combining TCSs with the HOV lane management can obviously mitigate traffic congestion.
Highlights
Transport plays a pivotal role in the nation's economy and quality of life
With the presence of tradable credits scheme (TCS), the highway authority enables any number of commuters to choose low-occupancy vehicles (LOVs) mode or high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) mode according to the setting of TCS which is able to lead to a decrease of the total commuting time
Considering the complexity of solving the proposed bilevel programming model, the Genetic Algorithms (GA) is applied to search for the optimal solutions
Summary
Transport plays a pivotal role in the nation's economy and quality of life. in many cities, road transport as a public entity suffers from over-consumption due to lack of clear property rights and results in traffic congestion. Yang and Huang [5] presented a theoretical model to deal with carpooling behaviour and optimal congestion pricing in a multi-lane highway with or without HOV lanes. In reality, cooperating with other management measures of HOV lanes, the HOT policy is a flexible and effective measure which enables the improvement of the utilization of HOV lanes by allowing LOVs that pay toll to use HOV lanes It concerns the congestion pricing which can lead to public protests.
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